A Fire Upon The Deep

This was an influential novel at the time it came out for the ideas it advanced and the huge contours on which it painted its story. For much of it, the focus is split between the galactic view of a Blight that threatened enormous stretches of space reaching down from the Transcend and the one planet where a family fleeing the Blight landed on a planet of non-spacefaring sophonts, soon reduced to only two children unaware of the secret their cargo vessel was carrying. In the middle section of the novel there is a slow motion voyage to bring the two plotlines together and at the end an action section to show how both groups manage to solve the desperate situations in which they were enmeshed. This is a book with big ambitions which influenced other authors to produced their own big concept books.

I enjoyed the worldbuilding in the space opera sections, but found the planet-based portions less compelling. The level of emotional investment I had with the characters was only just enough to pull me through the whole book, however, and I'm afraid that the big climax was for me marred by plot and character elements I disliked. The resolution at the very end, with the surviving High Beyond characters stranded on the planet, is something hard for me to accept as having solved all their issues in a satisfying way, despite the author's best efforts to tell me otherwise. He mentions the enormous side effects of the way the magical technological solution reshaped the nature of a large section of the galaxy and I wondered whether the probably suffering of any advanced inhabitants of those places was being soft-pedaled. So while I admire the profusion of new ideas found here, these cracks in the storytelling bothered me enough to keep from giving it a top rating.

I listened to the interesting sections at 1.5X speed in my audiobook and the other sections at 2X. I am glad I made it to the end but I do not plan to read the other books in the series.

This is a masterpiece of a book, deservedly considered a classic. It starts with a group of human scientists re-awakening an AI, but everything goes pear-shaped very quickly. From there two plot lines proceed in parallel, one concerning a family from the group that worked on the AI, the other concerning a group of mixed human and alien beings that are trying to deal with the menace unleashed on the galaxy by this AI. The greatest fascination of this novel is the alien races. They are very disctinctly different, but Vinge makes them believable at the same time. The plot line of the escaped family takes them to a world inhabited by beings with group consciousness. They are like small mammals, but an individual of this species is not even conscious or intelligent. It is only when they they join together in groups of 5-8 that they become intelligent entities. This is a very interesting idea, and Vinge develops it beautifully and in great detail. In the other plot line, one of the alien races is derived from aquatic plants/animals that get around on motorized carts, and might be the dominant race of the galaxy. Then there is the idea that in this universe the closer you get to the core of the galaxy the slower you travel, creating concentric zones where the speed possible varies.

What ties the two plot lines together is the possibility that the ship that took the family away may have the answer to defeating the rogue AI, so the ship with the mixed human/alien crew has to get there ahead of the AI. This novel has an impressive set of ideas that are fascinating. This is a book you have to read if you are a fan of science fiction.